Chris Preston is a 7th grade science teacher at Nagel Middle School in Cincinnati’s Forest Hills Local School District. He enjoys “challenging myself, colleagues, and my students to push the boundaries of teaching and learning.” Chris has presented at regional and national middle-level conferences and has co-authored a professional journal article. On Twitter: @cprestonrunning
by Chris Preston
Can middle school students inventively think? As part of a Powerful Learning Practice (PLP) team, I joined four of my school colleagues this past year on a journey to figure out the answer to that question. What we found humbled us. Not only are middle school students capable of inventively thinking, but some of our teaching practices actually hinder students who might otherwise push the limits of their own inventiveness.
Middle school students view inventive thinking as “smart,” “new,” “creative” and “out-of-the-box.” When asked what “out-of-the-box” means, students told one of our team members: “You are the box. This classroom is the box. This textbook is the box. A rubric is the box.” When students work with rubrics, they said, “we have everything we need for an A after the first day or two. What next? We aren’t really inspired to push ourselves because we don’t have to.”
OK. So, as teachers, what should be our reaction? Our PLP team, which consisted of five teachers of three separate subjects from five different interdisciplinary teams, needed time to process what we were learning about student perceptions. We fumbled through some conversations about the meaning of inventive thinking and how we might make it happen in our classrooms. Some of us, through opportunities offered by High AIMS and the Forest Hills School District, had been trained to use the framework of Problem Based Learning (PBL) in our classrooms. We designed units of instruction that (we hoped) focused on the 21st century skill of inventive thinking for all learners. We delivered instruction, gathered video evidence from our classrooms, and collected student survey responses throughout the year.
The results were interesting. We began to coalesce around several unifying ideas.
Unifying Idea #1: Authentic Tasks
Whether it was using modern-day technologies in a Social Studies classroom to solve problems in ancient Rome or creating an interactive exhibit in Science class for a local Children’s Museum, each of the units we designed had a unique authentic task embedded into the design. Students were motivated not only by the grade or grades they would receive but also the understanding that they were grappling with authentic problems and someone was listening to their ideas:
“I was most passionate about the Roman Time Machine because of the trust you had in us to choose our own experts and style of project.,” one student said. “This really showed me all the resources that are available and allowed us to branch out.”
The units were not perfect, but we did upset the routine in our classrooms. We put windows in “the box,” allowing students to see through our structure to a world they were being invited to design and create. At the conclusion of our instruction many students commented that they would approach solutions to questions much differently in the future: “It changed how I look at projects,” one said, “by really opening up my surroundings to more insightful sources of information, and not focusing just on knowledge I can find here at school.”
Unifying Idea #2: Connected Learning
As the result of our second unifying idea — Connected Learning — students came to realize that there are people in the world who are interested in what young people think and can help students understand information they’re interested in.
We pushed students to develop questions associated with tasks within the units. We made it mandatory for each student to make one contact outside of our building. The contact could be through an e-mail, a phone call, an IM chat session, a video Skype session, or through the use of other 21st century tools. The contact also needed to provide useful information: contacting the U.S. President is noble but might not yield anything. Contacting a local business owner, university professor, governmental leader, physician, or meteorologist might be more appropriate.
Students were amazed that they were allowed to send and receive e-mails during class to someone who could help them with their ideas. Social communication, to them, was something to be used outside of school, not as a classroom tool for learning. How many teachers would consider letting a student use his/her cell phone during class to join a conference call with a journalism team from a major regional newspaper? Before this year we might not have designed experiences that required such authentic connections to be made.
Unifying Idea #3: Collaborative Learning
We had the misconception that collaboration meant students working in groups, dividing and conquering bulleted lists from a teacher-generated rubric. Although collaboration can happen within the classroom in student groups using a teacher-generated rubric, what we discovered was different and more profound.
Collaboration can have two parts. During the first part students develop their own individual ideas pertaining to an authentic task — ideas rooted in reason and logic. The collaborative piece is students asking each other rigorous questions: Why are we designing our solution this way? Why did we choose this person to contact? Students commented repeatedly about the opportunity to work with students from other classes and, in some cases, other teams in our school. “We were able to get with other people that were in other classes, we got to make our own decisions on what we wanted for the project and what style of project we wanted to do, and lastly we had to get it done by ourselves.”
We found that the job of the teacher in these classrooms shifted from the main giver of knowledge to someone who coaches students toward solving an authentic problem while helping them connect content along the way.
We’ve been asked, “What next?” We feel as if our work to understand teaching in the 21st century has just begun. Addressing the skills and tools to equip students for the invention of new ideas and products in a constantly changing society and economy will be a battle that should continue to engage teachers and schools for years, if not decades, to come.
Find out more about the Nagel Middle School project (and watch a video clip) at the Action Research area of the Powerful Learning Practice website.
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Nice post about work in progress, Chris. It would be great if some of your readers here could share some things they’re doing to promote inventive and creative thinking… and maybe ask questions about what your students have done, in a little more detail.
Chris – our middle school is in the process of redesigning all our curricula to reflect PBL. I worked closely with our 6th grade social studies teachers this year to embed more opportunities for students to engage in authentic work and the results were astonishing – I-movie presentations to the Smithsonian Board of Directors recommending 19th century inventors to the “Smithsonian Invention Hall of Fame” – just to name one.
Excellent Mark. Many of the comments I’ve received from teachers are centered around the following: “I want to do more of problem/passion/project-based learning in my classroom, but the pacing guides and weekly data I have to turn into my administrator prevents me from feeling like I have freedom.” This is the reality. I think the trick might be to consistently figure out ways, through teacher-to-teacher conversations, to develop inventive thinking in students while operating in the “reality.” It sounds like your school/district is well on its way to making that happen.
Great post about challenging your students to real higher end thinking! KUDOS!!! I would like to read about what you did next and how you got there!
You’ve just given me an idea for a future post!
Chris– thank you for sharing. I am wondering how you helped your middle schoolers find experts –journalists, professors, local businessmen — to help them?
Have you experimented with project teams, that is having a group of students choose a project manager and perhaps assistant manager and then having the group divide up work based on strengths and interests?? This requires students to choose their partners with a different lens than who they just want to work with.
Having asked the above I think your expanded definition of collaboration is right on target.
Did the kids decide how their work was to be assessed?
Margaret…on local contacts, we gave students ideas and coached them through the process of writing or saying an appropriate e-mail or message. Once one or two students received replies the idea caught fire around the classroom. In the future, however, I believe that I might have some professional contacts on standby for students who struggle with the idea.
We, as teachers, did not have a standard method we used to group students. I used a method call “universal design” and allowed student choice as well. Your comments about student grouping are noted. Allowing students to choose based on strengths and weaknesses gets at the metacognitive skill.
More on assessment later…
On assessments…the short answer about students being a part of the assessment process is “yes.” After the students commented about rubrics our team re-thought how we might typically approach assigning a grade to work and products. We found that building in formative assessments throughout the units helped us and the students stay on track. In other words, it was a problem if we got to the end of the unit of instruction and were discovering, for the first time, that a student was earning an “F” for a grade.
I will say that connecting grade-specific content to the authentic tasks is challenging and requires some thought and work in the classroom. We found that inviting students to apply their experiences to standardized test questions aligned with the content associated with the tasks was beneficial. Conversations about “right” and “wrong” answers became spirited. Through those classroom conversations we began to connect the content to the task.
The document and the comments are very inspiring, considering the lock step NCLB syndrome that has been burned into the school level psyche. Middle School in and of itself has always presented problems. I have seen countless middle schools across Southern California and Northern California where the curriculum is taught by fear — in most cases with threats of not getting in to high school or somehow being mistreated when at the high school.
Some schools cooked up high interest, low value classes where the adage is: “I won’t bug you, if you do not bug me.”
Problem Based Learning is an amazing methodology when carefully thought through. In one eighth grade class I labored to find a task that would be interesting, cross-curriculum related at multiple levels, and difficult to answer.
I selected the following: How Much Water Did Columbus Need to get to the New World?
After about 20 minutes of silence, a student dared to speak and asked how do we find out? I gave about two hints before the groups of five became animated.
I wish high schools had this kind of freedom.
Your idea of connecting what goes on in the classroom with what is happening in the “real-world” is critical, I believe. Absolutely I can teach the standards of my earth science curriculum AND connect it to what is happening in the world.
I just need to throw off the confines of units that I’ve designed and that are ready to take off the shelf. And adjust the way I think about teaching. Instead I think you have to take the current events as the base and make sure you cover all the standards.
But why wouldn’t the WORLD end up covering all topics in earth science over the course of a school year? That makes me laugh….why did we ever do it any other way?
Chris– this is a great post! It’s interesting how important an authentic task is to our student’s learning, and how, so often, this component is absent from much of their classroom experience. Your post is powerful evidence that many of our students are willing, and able, to take control of their learning at young ages. All we need to do as educators is give them the opportunity and support they need.
Thanks for sharing your work!